Against the Current

Shen Jialan is the granddaughter of a senior minister of the Grand Secretariat (内阁). Her family is destroyed when her grandfather is falsely accused of treason. Her engagement to Lin Jinqi, grandson of the Minister of Personnel, is broken off by the Lin family, who want to protect themselves and marry into a more influential house.

She survives because a family who used to serve hers helps her escape. They have her take the identity of their dead daughter, Xu Lanxiang, and she enters the Lin household as a servant. According to published synopses, she gradually earns respect through intelligence and integrity while uncovering the conspiracy that destroyed her family. Tan Songyun (谭松韵) plays Xu Lanxiang, and Liu Xueyi (刘学义) plays Lin Jinqi. Xue Guihua, played by Guo Keyu (郭柯宇), is the servant woman whose dead daughter's name the heroine takes.

The drama is adapted from the novel Lanxiang Yuan (兰香缘) by He Yanshan. The directors are Huang Yingxiang (黄颖湘) and Chen Dan (陈丹), working from a screenplay credited to Tong Hua and Xiao Lou.

The title plays on the name the heroine has to live under: Lanxiang rugu can be read as "Lanxiang, as ever," a name that stays the same even as the person wearing it changes.

Reception of the ending, once the series finished, split. Some viewers praised the foreshadowing and the restraint of the last episodes. Others found the final stretch rushed, and readers of the novel objected that the ending differs from the book's.